and the walls of both, from floor to coping-stone, are covered
with fresco-painted pictures taking here the place occupied by mosaic in
such churches as the cathedral of Monreale, or by coloured glass in the
northern cathedrals of the pointed style. Many of these frescoes date from
years before the birth of Giotto. Giunta the Pisan, Gaddo Gaddi, and
Cimabue, are supposed to have worked there, painfully continuing or feebly
struggling to throw off the decadent traditions of a dying art. In their
school Giotto laboured, and modern painting arose with the movement of new
life beneath his brush. Here, pondering in his youth upon the story of
Christ's suffering, and in his later manhood on the virtues of S. Francis
and his vow, he learned the secret of giving the semblance of flesh and
blood reality to Christian thought. His achievement was nothing less than
this. The Creation, the Fall, the Redemption of the World, the moral
discipline of man, the Judgment, and the final state of bliss or
misery--all these he quickened into beautiful and breathing forms. Those
were noble days, when the painter had literally acres of walls given him
to cover; when the whole belief of Christendom, grasped by his own faith,
and firmly rooted in the faith of the people round him, as yet unimpaired
by alien emanations from the world of classic culture, had to be set forth
for the first time in art. His work was then a Bible, a compendium of
grave divinity and human history, a book embracing all things needful for
the spiritual and the civil life of man. He spoke to men who could not
read, for whom there were no printed pages, but whose heart received his
teaching through the eye. Thus painting was not then what it is now, a
decoration of existence, but a potent and efficient agent in the education
of the race. Such opportunities do not occur twice in the same age. Once
in Greece for the pagan world; once in Italy for the modern world;--that
must suffice for the education of the human race.

Like Niccola Pisano, Giotto not only founded a school in his native city,
but spread his manner far and wide over Italy, so that the first period of
the history of painting is the Giottesque. The Gaddi of Florence,
Giottino, Puccio Capanna, the Lorenzetti of Siena, Spinello of Arezzo,
Andrea Orcagna, Domenico Veneziano, and the lesser artists of the Pisan
Campo Santo, were either formed or influenced by him. To give an account
of the frescoes of these painters